C. A. W. Manning and the Discipline of International Relations

Interdisciplinarity and International Relations

“…After the Second World War, however, the development of IR in the United States changed the orientation of the discipline, and ushered in the second age (Long, 2005). The American academy located IR within political science departments, and those trained in IR in the 1950s and 1960s did so as political scientists in an atmosphere dominated by the attempt to emulate the accuracy and parsimony of the physical sciences.…”

“…It was only in the 1950s that IR became attached to political science. Beginning as a point of contact between many disciplines, it entered political science in the same decade in which strong arguments emerged for IR being regarded as a discrete discipline of study (Long, 2005). It is because of this that IR is frequently referred to as both a sub-discipline and as a discipline in its own right.…”

Bridging and Conversation in International Relations

“…Indeed, its place amongst or within the traditional academic disciplines has long been ambiguous and debated. IR developed as a point of contact between many disciplines, and did not find its connection to Political Science until the 1950s, when many voices began to push for IR to be considered a single, separate discipline of study (Ashworth 2009;Long 2005). Stanley Hoffmann, for example, noted the confusion caused by the "conglomeration of partial approaches" from other fields.…”

The English School’s Approach to International Law

“…It was this essentially relativistic conviction that led Manning, in particular, to stress that International Relations should be not be conceived as part of Political Science, History or Law but as a distinct academic discipline: one which drew on these and other cognate disciplines, but which discarded their domestic, 'state-bound', legal, ethical and sociological presuppositions. 4 …”